Joined: 23 Jan 2006Posts: 311Location: Capitol Hill
A friend of mine is working on plugging the Seattle bike data into the ByCycle route finding engine. Currently, ByCycle does Portland, OR and Milwaukee, WI. The Seattle beta is at:
If you have a chance please play with the site, and provide feedback here. Remember, these directions are a best effort guess based on the Seattle street grid and GIS bike map overlay. I know it currently has issues with one-way streets, also, the "show bike map" overlay does not currently work as it does for Portland. Obviously, do not trust this provide you a safe and correct route, especially in a beta form.
The feedback I would like is:
Would you consider a bike route finding site like this useful?
If so what features or data would make the site more useful?
Have you noticed any obvious errors? Do those errors present a possible serious safety hazard?
How usable do you feel the current site is?
What level of Seattle urban cycling experience do you feel is necessary to use the site? Novice, Intermediate, Experienced?
Anything else you feel is relevant.
I plan to present this at the May Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board meeting, I'd like to get some feedback from others before I do. Thanks!
Last edited by rlotz on Tue Apr 24, 2007 10:58 am; edited 1 time in total
pete jr
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 10:51 am
Joined: 13 Dec 2005Posts: 1930Location: balls deepx
it tells me to go up 15th and then right onto 65th to get to Magnusson Park from the UW. It's not really unsafe, but that's not exactly a pleasant set of hills.
rlotz
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:04 am
Joined: 23 Jan 2006Posts: 311Location: Capitol Hill
pete jr wrote:
it tells me to go up 15th and then right onto 65th to get to Magnusson Park from the UW. It's not really unsafe, but that's not exactly a pleasant set of hills.
I know that the Seattle bike map has an indication of hillyness, but I'm not sure how well that is exposed in the GIS data set (I am uneducated in the ways of GIS). Having the option to calculate a least hilly route would be good.
A feature I'd like to see is the way to build your own directions like Bikely or similar tools. By overlaying the bike map you could create your own route utilizing the suggested bikeways. Since it has some ability to identify intersections the site may even be able to automatically build a cue sheet with directions that include street names.
henry
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:07 am
somewhat piggishJoined: 05 Aug 2005Posts: 5415Location: on porch with shotgun
I tried a couple of routes and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. However, it did send me straight UP denny, which is not a route I'd pick for myself.
1337Joined: 22 Jul 2005Posts: 6705Location: right over
from my house to westlake it took me on brooklyn rather than roosevelt, and also up the northbound offramp of the university bridge behind terry/lander.
another "good" one is from greenlake to seward park - mlk rather than along the lake?
it seems pretty decent, as far as such things go. it's not the first thing i would recommend to a new cyclist though.
i've been thinking that what these need are some kind of system to track user popularity. the best places to ride are the places other people ride... so how do we get that data?
rlotz
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:23 am
Joined: 23 Jan 2006Posts: 311Location: Capitol Hill
lantius wrote:
i've been thinking that what these need are some kind of system to track user popularity. the best places to ride are the places other people ride... so how do we get that data?
We've discussed that. One way would be using GPS data from on bike GPSes (possibly even some phones now). That user supplied route could be used to build a library of useful route segments and perhaps have some user supplied attributes applied like "safe" or "high traffic" in addition to automatically generated ones for elevation. As GPSes become more prevalent it would be nice to allow loading the routes back into GPS to give turn-by-turn directions.
I think allowing users to build routes would also be a good way to incorporate popularity that can be used when generating routes. If people used it in place of (or in addition to) sites like Bikely then those tracks could be used to build additional user supplied bike ways and possible connectors not on the existing grid.
I also noticed the path up the wrong way to connect to the University Bridge. I think its an issue with not yet understanding one-way streets.
joeball
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 12:13 pm
Joined: 24 Jul 2005Posts: 6037Location: Ether
On Saturday I rode just a few miles south, basically on the same ridge I live on in West Seattle. I was taking the side streets and could never stay 1 or 2 streets away from the arterials for very long. I would either face steep blocks or dead ends. In one case there was a little stairwell which I could take but it was more a pain since I had my xtracycle that trip. Cruising through some of the neighborhoods would make me think of Portland...until I hit one of the dead ends or needed to make an annoying work around to continue on my path. There is a difference in infrastructure, topography and development between Seattle and Portland and I won't get into how one should be like the other but Portland seems much more user friendly and on the surface there seem like more options to do the same thing. It's the only other city I have cycled to any great extent in either.
Regarding this tool. I just don't know how much use it has. Honestly I think asking someone will result in better advice. I'm not sure what algorithms and optimization this program is using but it seems like it still needs to be calibrated to a particular city. In Seattle the North/South routes have constraints like crossing the ship canal bridges , and east/west routes can make you cross many ridges. Each of us has our own preferences but I would say most cyclists in this city have a small quiver of routes we take and use them in different variations to get to different locations. I guess this is where having predefined bike routs comes in and prioritizing the program to get you on them as much as possible without making you fly or float. Minimizing stupid steep hills and minimizing elevation gain in excess of the net elevation change between the to/from destinations are definitely high on my internal optimizations. Following the creeks (or where they should be) tends to be good/fun advice as well.
pete jr
Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 1:22 pm
Joined: 13 Dec 2005Posts: 1930Location: balls deepx
i thought about this problem a bit at the beginning of the year when i was faced with the possibility of building something similar. at this point, though, i think it's not a bad idea to just follow the BMP routes when possible and then branch off close to the destination.
i'm sure brandon has some thoughts too...
mattm
Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 1:36 pm
Joined: 20 Dec 2006Posts: 13Location: captiol ill
very cool! i've seen bycycle's portland map before, and i figured it was only a matter of time before seattle's edition came along.
personally, i don't want to use route-finding sites to plan routes, i use a combination of paper/web maps and getting lost. then i click out the route (on a site like veloroutes.org or bikely.com) and see what the elevation/distance was, or will be, if i'm planning a route.
after a few years of cycling in seattle (or any city i guess) it's not so much a matter of *how* to get there, it's just a matter of which way. so this is very useful for newbies to seattle, but not so much for people that know their way around. but as people start commuting to work more often, etc, there will be more and more demand for sites like this.
as for elevation, i agree that most people will want a feature that avoid nasty climbs. but at the same time, some peeps (like me) enjoy seattle's nasty hills, and even plan routes that explicitly go over the worst ones. so if you do make it avoid big hills, perhaps there could be an option to seek them out as well?
if you do want to integrate elevation data, check out the USGS's site: http://gisdata.usgs.gov/XMLWebServices/TNM_Elevation_Service.php. they've got a free web-service that will give you elevation for any latitude/longitude pair, although in your case you might just want their whole data-set on your server.
and while i'm at it... another rad feature (if it's not already there) would be to show stop-lights, and even have the routing algorithm route around areas with lots of stop-lights, so you don't have to stop every block.
Joined: 15 Aug 2006Posts: 2666Location: No Fun Town, USA
pete jr wrote:
it tells me to go up 15th and then right onto 65th to get to Magnusson Park from the UW. It's not really unsafe, but that's not exactly a pleasant set of hills.
Which is weird, because 15th is not a recommended route on the Seattle Bike Map (17th to 20th is). It could be it thinks this is the shortest route, but actually 45th/Sand Point wins that category.
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